The internet was supposed to help free oppressed people but, as Evgeny
Morozov's The Net Delusion shows, it has become a tool for control rather
than liberation, says John Preston

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, of course. According to the prophets, the scribes and the wiseacres, the arrival of the internet was going to be the biggest thing to happen to democracy since the invention of the ballot box. With free access to information and communications, populations would rise up, topple totalitarian regimes and send dictators fleeing into the night.

Or so the theory went. And it’s proved to be a remarkably resilient theory – one that’s continued to dominate the thinking of Western 'cyber-utopians’ despite teetering piles of evidence to the contrary. When Iranians demonstrated against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime in 2009, the spark that fired the dissident masses was widely and po-facedly identified as being… Twitter. Let the people tweet and they will tweet their way to freedom, insisted scores of ostensibly sane people.

One of George W Bush’s former security advisers, Mark Pfeifle, went so far as to nominate Twitter for the Nobel Peace Prize – a move that suggests the aptly named Pfeifle should be kept under conditions of extreme security himself.

Over here, Gordon Brown was equally swept away by cyber-utopianism. Nothing like the Rwandan genocide could ever happen again, Brown insisted, 'because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken’.

The trouble with talk like this, claims Evgeny Morozov, a 26-year-old Belarusian who now lives in the United States, is that it’s at best naive and at worst bonkers. Why then have so many people – of wildly divergent political views – fallen victim to it? Morozov is inclined to point the finger, albeit a little waveringly, at the hippies. However, Ronald Reagan doesn’t escape a ticking-off here.

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It was the hippies in whose woolly idealism the seeds of the internet first took root, and it was Reagan, in one of his lavish rhetorical flourishes, who talked about 'breezes of electronic beams blowing through the Iron Curtain as if it were lace’. In both cases the message was the same: large doses of information and communications technology are bound to prove lethal to the most repressive of regimes.

It is only recently that the clouds of guff have parted and people have begun to recognise this for the nonsense it is. What’s become all too plain is that the internet can just as easily be used to control people as it can to educate them. After the failed uprising in Iran, the government hunted down dissidents online, tracking them through their emails and using face-recognition technology to identify people from pictures taken on mobile phones.

But it’s not just the Iranians: they’re all at it. Al-Qaeda has proved to be as proficient in using the internet as its Western opponents, while the Chinese government recently devised a program called Green Dam that analyses people’s internet habits and shuts off access to sites it disapproves of. Hearteningly, the program has proved to have a number of insoluble glitches. To try to stop people accessing pornography, Green Dam shut down any site featuring unusual amounts of the colour pink – denoting skin tones. However, to the government’s fury, naked dark-skinned people continued to sail unscathed through the censorship portals.

And herein lies one of the key arrows that has pierced the heart of all this cyber-idealism. People, given access to unfettered information, don’t necessarily strive for freedom. All too often, they’ve got less elevated things on their minds.

In 2007, a group of wealthy geeks in the West volunteered to lend their computer bandwidth to people in countries with repressive regimes in the hope – the confident hope – they’d soon educate themselves about the horrors of their various regimes. Instead, they promptly went in search of pictures of Gwen Stefani in her underwear and Britney Spears out of it.

If only these idealists had paid more attention to the lessons of recent history. The notion that more information inevitably leads to a greater desire for freedom took a battering in the Seventies and Eighties in East Germany – the only communist country with ready access to the Western media. Far from fanning the flames of liberation, a diet of television programmes from the United States dampened them down to a conveniently quiescent level. Paying no attention to the latest news from Nato, East Germans lay supine and glassy-eyed in front of endless repeats of Dallas and Dynasty.

An American academic who taught in East Berlin in the late Eighties remembers that when he brought in a map of the US for his students, they showed little interest in anything other than the precise locations of Denver and Dallas. This, Morozov argues, doesn’t mean there’s no correlation between greater information and a striving for freedom; just that it’s a far more complex issue than most people have chosen to recognise.

The Net Delusion injects a welcome dose of common sense into an issue that’s been absurdly lacking in it. At his best, Morozov is lively and combative, as well as dauntingly well-informed – his bibliography alone runs to 70 pages.

But, as this might suggest, he’s clearly gone all-out to have the most authoritative word on the subject. And while his erudition can’t be faulted, he’s also prone to windiness, repetition and such lofty hectoring that there were several occasions when this reader found his mind turning wistfully to less didactic, even darker things.